The Ice Queen of Valdis – Part 1: The Frozen Court

The lodge stood alone on a snowbound ridge with a stone fireplace the size of a small room, a hall hung with antlers and windows frosted white. Freya had hired it for four days. She had told Callum to pack nothing but a good coat.

She was forty-three, a glaciologist who spent half the year at the poles and who wanted, for one weekend, to be a monarch. Callum was thirty-five, a mountain rescue paramedic, strong, practical and exhausted by being the one who is always depended on. They had been together five years.

By the fire, with the snow hissing against the glass, she laid a sheet of paper on his knee. "The Pact of the Frozen Court." His limits, hers, the plain rules: no marks, no real cold, no leaving the lodge, nothing neither of them had agreed. The word was Thaw.

"If you say it, the Queen melts. I am Freya. We have soup."

"And if you say it?"

"The same. Always the same." She kissed him lightly, then stood, and from a trunk drew a long white fur-trimmed robe and a circlet of silver, thin as frost. "Kneel, Sir Callum."

He knelt on the hearth rug. Her voice was a different thing now, low and slow and utterly sure, with a cool musical edge. "You are the last knight of a broken kingdom, taken in my passes and brought before my throne. Do you yield?"

"I yield, Majesty."

"You do not yield. You are captured." She walked around him with her hands behind her back. "Your sentence is not yet decided. You will wait in the Hall of Frost until I have considered it."

The Hall of Frost was the lodge's cold back room, with a rug, a lantern and a heater turned to its lowest warm setting. The door shut. He heard a latch he could lift from his side. He looked at it, and his shoulders came down for the first time in a year.

"Sir Callum," called the Queen. "Are you content?"

"Content, Majesty."

"Good. Remain so."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Thaw.